Politica fiscal y tan otros cosas..
Doug/
This week, I’ve been attending the joint United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and European Organisation for Cooperation and Development (OECD) Seminar on Fiscal Policy for the region. You might think this would be beyond me… indeed, after the first session without the assistance of interpretation via a clever little machine, I was sure it was beyond me too!
However, with some determination, the seminars have proved very interesting and have been an opportunity to learn more about the region, the comparative performances of Chile, Argentina, Peru, Mexico and Brazil (to name the primary participants) on issues of taxation, income redistribution, fiscal policies to manage the economy, fuel taxation and pensions.
However, i’ve also learned a lot about spanish…. this region is highly diverse and as a consequence, so is the language. After listening to lectures given by individuals from each nation, i’ve put together a rating of intelligibility of spanish for each nationality. This can be seen in the sidebar below (go to the bottom of the weblinks).
Peruvians come out top… their spanish is both slow and easy to understand. I can listen to their lectures without translation! Chile… i’m sorry to say, runs bottom of the rank. Fast, difficult and said without breathing. Probably in response to the smog that every chilean lives with in Santiago!
To add to the difficulty, today, we had lectures in english with spanish slides, lectures in spanish with portuguese slides (that was wierd… i didn’t notice till the end!), lectures in spanish with english slides and then one in what can only be described as kling-on (central american spanish). No comment and no offence intended! I admire the interpreters for their work!
Generally speaking however, its been great to attend the seminar and to learn the spanish terms for economic concepts and phrases…. that is… if they exist. Today, I laughed when told that there is no term in Latin American spanish for “corruption”. Nor, apparently, for “Willingness to pay” (an important concept for a transport economist!) which slipped out in the middle of a chilean’s discussion of air pollution.
The latter gives me some hope that I might find a job here- there is a lot of scope for the use of economic evaluation methods in policy making here in Chile, for example, assessing the health costs of air pollution in Santiago. Anyone can say its high… but how high?!!